JFF - 二重生活 (Double Life)

If Radin! was the French movie I saw this year that called out to me, 二重生活 would be the Japanese equivalent. As soon as I read the synopsis, I decided that this was a movie I definitely had to see at the Japanese Film Festival.

The story follows a graduate student named Tama who is in the process of writing her Masters thesis in Philosophy. She seems somewhat listless. She submits her topic proposal, to try and find the meaning of existence through interviewing 100 random people. Her supervisor, inspired by a book on his desk by Sofie Calle, suggests 1 person, instead of 100. And rather than interview them, he suggests she follow them and note down the things that they do, in order to try and gain some insight into their life. Tama questions the legality of this, and her supervisor responds that as long as she's following someone for no reason (as opposed to someone who does it for malicious or selfish purposes), it should be fine. He does set one rule: that she must not interact with her target.

Tama says she'll think it over, and goes to a bookstore to do some research on how to tail someone. While she's there, she notices her neighbour working there. He gets a text, and then has to dash off, so she decides to follow him. She continues to follow him to a café where he meets up with a woman who isn't his wife, and who hands him a watch, saying, "Don't leave it behind next time." She follows the two of them until they go into a small alley and begin to have sex. Tama paces back and forth, thinking over something, and eventually she returns home to re-write her thesis proposal to focus on one person.

I find the idea pretty fascinating, and the movie looks into the divide between a person's public life and their private life, as well as the ways in which people find a way to tame that indescribable feeling that there must be something more to life. From the start, we learn that her target is a famous book editor, whose edited works often go on to become best-sellers. He has a beautiful wife and a wonderful daughter, a nice house, and the respect of the people around him. Why would someone like that risk everything by cheating?

This probably speaks volumes of my personality, but it wasn't until recently that I realised how harmful stalking actually is. A friend of mine told me about her experience with a stalker, and how scared she felt. In her case, she knew her stalker, and was pressured not to make a big deal about it. redbeanpork also linked me a reddit thread "Men of Reddit, what creepy things have women done to you?" and I've been horrified reading all the responses.

From my perspective, I viewed it as a quest for truth. I wanted to know something about someone, so I figured as long as I didn't do anything illegal, it was fine to use everything at my disposal to find it. But people keep things hidden for a reason, and have a right to privacy. I joked about finding out the name of MrCrush's cat, but if he didn't want to tell me when asked, then I should respect that he doesn't want me to know.

Then there's the other aspect of Tama's tailing. It started as a joke, as well, but I did start taking notes about people. Mostly Jal, because he seems to find it funny, but it has extended to anyone whose phone number I have. It doesn't seem that malicious. In Jal's case, I have his preferred way to drink coffee, his cookie and cake preferences, his favourite lunch foods, his middle name and where his parents live. But he told me all of these things willingly. Is the creepy part that I've noted them down?

I also write about things that have happened to me in my journal. D made a claim about himself, saying he never did X, and I refuted it, saying that I had seen him do it in the past. He called me a liar, so I pulled out my journal, looked up the entry and told him the day that he did it, reminding him of the situation. Obviously, that was really creepy, and I shouldn't have revealed that I had a journal. But I've never felt that keeping a journal was particularly bad.

The movie left me feeling very undecided. Most of my friends joke about my stalker-ish tendencies now, and it's even becoming something that new people hear when they're introduced to me. It's often mentioned in a joking way, but stalking definitely has a negative connotation to it. Even though I don't mean anything malicious by it, I can understand people being unsettled by it.

To add another thing to my list of life changes I want to make, I'm going to try and hang up the deerstalker hat. All of my stalker-ish things I claim as me using my detective skills, but I'm not a detective, and there's no reason for me to do these things other than to satisfy my own curiosity. This is falling under the same bucket as the picturing someone naked thing. If they give their consent, then it's OK (some people seem to like to challenge me to find out information), but the default is to try and respect their privacy.

Obviously, this is going to be a big change for me, but as with everything else I do, I will try my best.

But back to the original topic, the movie was very interesting. It wasn't quite the movie I was expecting, and had more of a philosophical side than a thriller side, but it was definitely enjoyable, and it was one of those movies that makes you think about your life afterwards.

Automated Meaning

Apologies for the crappy photo, I went to a talk where someone presented a robot they had built, but I forgot to take a photo myself, so I had to take a photo of someone else's photo.

Pharmacist linked me this video where Elon Musk talks about how Universal Basic Income will become necessary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6HPdNBicM8

Essentially, it's something he believes will have to happen due to the RISE OF THE MACHINES. The idea is that certain tasks will become automated, so we won't need people to do them anymore. But what will we do with all those people? How will they earn enough money to get by? He says that the conclusion is to have a basic income for everyone, to cover living expenses, I assume, but then he raises an important point: many people derive meaning from their work, and so how will people who are just being paid to live feel like they have meaning in their lives?

I have often claimed to be a utilitarian, and though I don't really talk about it often, I don't really like the idea of living past the age of 50-ish, as I believe the amount that I can contribute to society will be less than the resource drain that I will impose on society. Something which is easy to say now that 50 is quite a while away, but that's currently how I feel. I would like to point out that I don't feel compelled to go on an elderly killing spree, it's just a belief that I hold about myself!

I feel that way because for me, the idea of being a burden on the people around me makes me feel terrible. On the flip side, if I believe that someone else is a burden, it makes me feel sad. I guess it depends on what level of income the universal basic income is. We have the dole in Australia, and I'm not sure how well people can live off it, but it's probably low enough to be a disincentive for everyone to want to live off it, and hopefully high enough that people are not living a massively diminished life while on it.

So suppose that the UBI was high enough that everyone could live off it. Robots are able to do all the things that we need to do to produce food, energy, services, so nobody ever has to work. What kind of world would that be? Assuming the robots don't rise up and demand equal rights, of course. It sounds kinda nice. You'd have more time to see those people you never have time to see, more time to take up that hobby / sport you never had the chance to do. People would, in an ideal world, be able to do what they enjoy doing, rather than what they are compelled to do for 40 hours a week in order to make ends meet. Sounds wonderful, right?

In essence, I think it would suck, and for exactly the reason Elon Musk states: you would lose all meaning in your life. Leisure would become work. For some people, there will still be a drive to excel, and they may enjoy having the opportunity to hone their craft, but I imagine for a lot of people, the desire to indulge in relaxing will be stronger than any desire to make a real effort doing something.

Everyday leisure would eventually become boring, so let's scrap that world and move on to what I think the next automated world would look like: people are free from having to do menial tasks, so they have more time to work in "innovative" fields. There would be an increase in the number of artists, or inventors. The people who create the TV shows and movies for us to enjoy (unless that can be automated, too), and the people who improve upon existing technologies will be those that are praised. Perhaps they will be paid more than regular non-creator people? Will we still end up with a class system, where you have creators vs non-creators? What will the non-creators do other than consume? I feel like that's a pretty empty life as well. As nice as it is to veg out in front of the TV every now and again, it's not something that I'd like to do for the rest of my life. I could try my hand at creating as well, but how rubbish would you feel if you tried and failed, confirming your status as a useless mouth to feed?

Ultimately, I can't seem to get past that point: why bother living if I'm not contributing anything? In Japan, it felt like there were a lot of "busy-work" jobs, which I didn't think were really required, but perhaps they are only there just to keep people employed? We saw some people at the entrance to parking lot whose only role seemed to be to tell people that there was a car coming out. Except there was an automated voice system which was saying the same thing, and a beeping sound. We don't have that here, and people seem to be able to cope fine. But maybe that's the solution - create enough busy-work that people do feel like their life has meaning.

Perhaps there are people who are required to answer surveys all day to get a general feel for the population's opinion on X. We could live without it, but it may help drive things like future planning decisions. Or, as Autofix linked in an interesting article, maybe you have more people doing the same job, but working less. If it takes 10 people to do a job for 40 hours a week, maybe you could hire 20 people and have them each only work 20 hours. That means you employ twice as many people, giving them all some meaning to their life, and (ideally) the same amount of work gets done.

As much as I dream about winning the lottery and retiring, work does form a large component of my life, and it is something challenging that I'm forced to face, so I feel compelled to work hard, thus giving myself a sense of fulfilment at the end of the day.

Monument Legs

To bundle up a few Monopoly streets together, we ended up doing a fairly long walk. The total distance as calculated by Google maps is 8.5kms (here's a route, though probably not the one we took, because we got lost a few times). That doesn't include walking around the Tower of London, and going to the post office to post the postcard for MrFodder's grandparents.

Monument (to the Great Fire of London) was the second last thing we did, and it was a bit crazy.

We were pretty tired by then, having spent most of the day walking, but I wanted to get that certificate, so I suggested we go up the stairs. All 311 of them.

This is a photo from about a 1/4 of the way up the steps, and you can't even see the steps at the top from here.

We took a few breaks going up, and luckily it wasn't very crowded (probably around 3pm?), as the stairs near the top are quite narrow, and so only one person would be able to go up at a time, which meant if anyone was coming down, we'd have to walk back down to let them past us. We did make it all the way to the top, and we got our certificates on the way down (so I'm guessing all you need to do is pay £4, walk in, and walk back out without going up the stairs).

In hindsight, it feels a little crazy that we did so much walking. Monument wasn't even our last stop, we also walked to Fleet St, which was not too bad, and we found a lolly shop that sold Jolly Ranchers so MrFodder was happy. But it did set the pace for the rest of our trip.

We obviously did a lot of walking after London, and whenever we felt like our strength was flagging, one of us would say, "Monument legs!" and it would conjure up the memory of having walked so far, and still made it all the way up Monument. If we could do that, then we could walk up whatever hill we had to walk up to get wherever we were going.

So I'm glad we went to London first, because if it hadn't been for Monument legs, we probably wouldn't have done as much walking as we did.